Student Services Blog

SAFS alum Donna Hauser is featured in UW Today:
‘Reductions in sea ice in the Arctic have a clear impact on animals such as polar bears that rely on frozen surfaces for feeding, mating and migrating. But sea ice loss is changing Arctic habitat and affecting other species in more indirect ways, new research finds.
Beluga whales that spend summers feeding in the Arctic are diving deeper and longer to find food than in earlier years, when sea ice covered more of the ocean for longer periods, according to a new analysis led by University of Washington researchers.

SAFS professor Kristin Laidre is featured in UW Today (February 9):
‘Narwhals are some of the most elusive creatures in the ocean, spending most of their lives in deep water far from shore. But research being presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland Feb. 12 may shed a bit of light on these enigmatic marine mammals.
New research shows narwhals may prefer to congregate near unique glacier fjords with thick ice fronts and low to moderate calving activity, where icebergs break off infrequently.

SAFS professor Tim Essington is featured in UW Today (February 8):
‘To successfully manage fisheries, factors in the environment that affect fish — like food sources, predators and habitat — should be considered as part of a holistic management plan.
That approach is gaining traction in fisheries management, but there has been no broad-scale evaluation of whether considering these ecosystem factors makes any economic sense for the commercial fishing industry.

SAFS professor Ray Hilborn is featured on KUOW:
‘Climate change has been identified as a threat to fisheries all over the world, but it’s not easy to find out information about the carbon footprint of seafood. Most groups that offer consumers information about seafood “sustainability” focus on issues like fishing industry practices and regulations.
Seafood Watch, one of the leading guides, doesn’t look at the carbon footprint of the fish they rate.

SAFS grad student Thiago Couto is featured in UW Today (January 22):
‘Hydropower dams may conjure images of the massive Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state or the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei, China — the world’s largest electricity-generating facility.
But not all dams are the stuff of documentaries. Tens of thousands of smaller hydroelectric dams exist around the world, and all indications suggest that the number could substantially increase in the future.

SAFS professor Julian Olden is featured in UW Today (December 18):
‘Dams and fish have never been best friends.
Thousands of dams built along U.S. rivers and streams over the last century now provide electricity for homes, store water for agriculture and support recreation for people. But they also have significant downstream impacts: They reduce the amount and change the timing of flowing water that fish rely on for spawning, feeding and migration.

SAFS Professor Tom Quinn is featured in UW Today:
‘It’s no secret that human activities affect fish, particularly those that must migrate to reproduce. Years of building dams and polluting rivers in some regions have left fish such as salmon struggling to return to their home streams and give birth to the next generation.
A new University of Washington study points to yet another human factor that is hampering the ability of fish to reproduce: the timing of our fishing seasons.

SAFS faculty Tom Quinn and Ray Hilborn are featured on CNN Politics:
‘This is the most valuable wild salmon fishery in the world
Under the Trump administration, it could become a mine.

This year, 56 million sockeye salmon swam hundreds of miles from the ocean toward the rivers and streams of the Bristol Bay watershed in southwest Alaska.

Many that escaped fishermen and bears leapt over waterfalls and used a mysterious combination of the Earth’s magnetic field and their own sensory memories to locate the exact streams where they were born — and then spawned, made gravel nests for their young, and died.

SAFS postdoc Sean Anderson is featured in UW Today:
‘For people who make a living by harvesting natural resources, income volatility is a persistent threat. Crops could fail. Fisheries could collapse. Forests could burn. These and other factors — including changing management regulations and practices — can lower harvests, which depresses income for farmers, fishers and timber harvesters. But the ways that these forces interact to impact income have been difficult to track, especially at the level of the individual worker.

SAFS postdoc Lewis Barnett and professors Trevor Branch and Tim Essington are featured in UW Today:
‘Like old-growth trees in a forest, old fish in the ocean play important roles in the diversity and stability of marine ecosystems. Critically, the longer a fish is allowed to live, the more likely it is to successfully reproduce over the course of its lifetime, which is particularly important in variable environmental conditions.